Hitting My Stride, Sort Of

I'm sitting here on a Sunday afternoon holding my office hours in the main promenade of the female wing, between Magrudy's bookstore and the coffee stand. Note to self: avoid blueberry muffin in the future, Starbucks it ain't. As I've discussed, since I teach in the female wing but have an office in the male wing it is impossible for my students to visit my office. So, I have started holding my office hours out in the main promenade. I posted a picture of the area a few posts back. It looks like the poshest mall you can imagine. The first floor is reserved for shops (yet to be filled, with the exception of Magrudy's) and the second and third floors feature offices and classrooms. To me it's cool to sit out here just to watch the parade of female students and the infinite variety of fashion statements that one can make with an abaya (which I've discussed before). Today I saw the first girl (forgive the use of the terms boy and girl - it's a cultural thing, I don't know anyone at Zayed who says women or men) with colored hair - a streak of blonde. It is rather amazing. I saw three girls on the same bench today: one was covered from head to toe in very familiar fashion, another who were her hijab just like a scarf and who had a colored border on her abaya and what must have been four inches heels on her red high heels, and one who wore her abaya completely open to display her punk rock t-shirt, faded jeans and hi-top Keds. Apparently there is a big move towards a short and sassy bob cut, as compared to the usual fascination with long hair.

I had two great classes today, which for any teacher make our day. As my good friend Alfonso Capone always opines, as long as things are going well in class it doesn't matter what buffoonery the administration is cooking up. I'm starting to get a better sense of the students and what I can expect. I'm really pushing them to analyze material and not just write down what I say and rely upon wrote memorization (which is very much in the tradition that they've experienced up to this point). In my 8:00 class we started to discuss World War I and we had a wonderful discussion. The really liked the poetry of the common soldiers as well as the propaganda posters. When I showed them the famous poster of the little girl sitting on her father's lap and asking, "Daddy, what did you do during the Great War?" they had a very tangible reaction - I suspect because they in turn wrap their fathers around their own little fingers. They did say that they thought that it was unfair to take that approach to shaming young men into fighting, which is good because I want them to understand the very human nature of the conflict and how it changed an entire generation. My 13:00 class is getting ready to start on the Aztecs, although I included a tour around Central and South America to examine, briefly, the Olmecs, Mayans, Moche, Nazca and Incas, just so they'd know that the Aztecs didn't exist in a vacuum. We were bruting our way through a reading from the Mayan epic the Popol Vuh, which they initially thought was stupid but eventually grow to like. We read the section where the first hero twins of the story, One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu, were killed by the lords of the underworld, and One Hunahpu's head was tossed in a calabash tree. Then a young virginal maiden, Lady Blood, came to see the amazing sight, only to have the skull spit into her hand and impregnate her, which led her father to order her taken off and killed, and her heart brought back to prove that she was dead (and she substituted a heart made from tree sap, which fooled the gods). The students did a great job digging into the analysis of what might have been going on. First off, two of them pointed out that they have the same story in the Quran, the story of the virgin birth of Maryam (Mary in the Christian tradition). Secondly, they pulled out the obvious Snow white reference (although they were wigged to find out that the story is very old and not a creation of a writer at Walt Disney a few decades ago). Finally, and most importantly, they culled out that it was the interplay between the Mayan priest telling the story orally to a Spanish priest, and then having the story go through Latin and Spanish versions, which might have led to the fusing together of the different versions. I was very proud of their effort and things are starting to come together very nicely.

Oh, and I brought my 8:00 class cookies this morning to apologize for being late on the first day (when my classroom was changed at the last moment). It seemed only fair since I demand that they bring me cookies or cupcakes if they are late. And speaking of which, while I was sitting here typing away a student walked up and gave me a cookie and apologized for being late last week.